by Dr. William L. Pierce
National Vanguard, August 1984
There are two things fundamental to every society: the quality of its human stock—that is, the vitality, intelligence, creativity, courage, and will of its people and the values which guide it.
One may he tempted to reduce these two fundamentals to a single determinant—namely, to the racial character of the society's people—since the most basic values are innate. That reduction, however, ignores the all-too-evident fact that the values which guide a society may not be the innate values of the race which founded it.
Innate values express themselves subtly—and, in most cases, unconsciously. A homogeneous population permitted to develop in isolation over a long period of time will usually have a society which reflects faithfully the people's innate values, whether they consciously recognize them as such or not. But when a society, without being conscious of its own value, is subjected almost constantly to extraneous influences, it will often be the case that some of its guiding values become extraneous. And, of course, when the population base of a society loses its homogeneity, then the very concept of innate values becomes ill-defined for that society.
Only when a homogeneous people, living in accord with its innate values, has become conscious of those values and translated them from feeling to knowledge does it gain a degree of immunity from extraneous influences, because only then can it surely distinguish what is extraneous from what is its own and reject the former while continuing to shape its society and guide its development in accord with the latter.
I had come to understand this by 1974, the year in which the National Alliance was founded. This understanding gave me the basis for the program of the new organization with a strategy quite different from any of the right-wing strategies I had evaluated and rejected in the preceding decade.
It was—and is—an organization for racial survival and progress. Its strategy rests on several assumptions about the course of national and world events over the next couple of decades:
- There will be no sudden collapse of U.S. governmental authority, due either to an economic catastrophe or to military action by a foreign government.
There will be a continuation of the present trend toward more governmental cynicism, corruption, and inefficiency. As the present generation of senior, White civil servants retires and "affirmative action" brings more non-Whites into the bureaucracy, along with a more permissively raised and less-responsible generation of Whites, there will be more waste, bungling, and minor breakdowns, until the level of governmental efficiency and integrity approaches that in El Salvador.
At the same time the government will grow more repressive, with eventual bans on private firearms and any exercise of free speech deemed threatening to the established order.
Despite their growing unpopularity in some segments of society, the Jews will retain their control of the mass media, the affections of most of organized Christianity, and their influence over the political process. As by far the best organized, most purposeful, and most intelligent pressure group, they will become even more powerful and dangerous as the standards and institutions of the host society continue to decay, and as the growing power of other non-White minorities provides more leverage to use against the dwindling White majority.
Although technocratic and bureaucratic elites—scientists and engineers; lawyers, public office-holders, and top corporate administrators—along with the wealthier members of the entrepreneurial class, will have enough money and mobility to insulate themselves, more or less, from worsening social conditions, and although increases in the productivity of some sectors of the economy as a result of further advances and applications of the microelectronics revolution will continue to provide a high material standard of living for many others, life for most White Americans will become increasingly ignoble, unnatural, and restricted. In addition, White workers in many occupational sectors will find their material living standard declining along with other standards.
There will be reactions among the White population to the continued decay of their society and the worsening of their living conditions—minor (or even major) taxpayer revolts, organized protests and demonstrations by farmers or other occupational groups, occasional assassinations of leading politicians, and the popping up of all sorts of fads, cults, and new ideological movements either implicitly or explicitly hostile to the policies of the authorities—but the media, the churches, and the government, working in tandem, will be able to keep most of the population obedient most of the time, so long as there is not a catastrophic collapse of the economy.
Most White Americans will continue to drift morally in the same direction they have been moving since the Second World War, toward a greater acceptance of miscegenation, the presence of more non-Whites in their midst, and such evils as drug abuse and homosexuality. Their standards for both public and private behavior will continue to decline. Even racially conscious White parents will have little success, on the average, in preventing their children from being swept along with this tide.
Unforeseen developments always arise, of course. History is full of surprises, and there can be no doubt that the future will be too. It is only prudent to expect the unexpected and to maintain readiness to take advantage of it, whatever it may be. But a people in imminent danger of extinction had better rely on something besides an act of Providence to pull itself back from the brink. It had better have a program.
After this lengthy and highly personal introduction, the program of the National Alliance can be stated succinctly. It consists of the following steps, or phases: first, cadre-building; second, community-building; and third, commutiny action. Although these phases must be initiated in the indicated sequence, they will overlap; that is, the activities associated with earlier phases will continue even as new phases begin.
Cadre-building is the task of attracting the strongest, ablest and spiritually soundest individuals who can be found and functionally integrating them into a structured organization. The principal function of the organization, prior to the initiation of the third phase, is the generation of propaganda for the purpose of attracting more members to the cadre.
Such propaganda is different from that intended to change public opinion or public behavior. Both types of propaganda consist of facts and ideas which can move and inspire people as well as enlighten them. But cadre-building propaganda is addressed to an elite, while third-phase propaganda is addressed to the general (White) public. The former is designed to attract, the latter to persuade or agitate.
Most important, whereas third-phase propaganda typically concerns itself with people's everyday personal concerns—with their fears for their physical safety or their economic security, with their resentment against those who offend their sense of propriety or fairness, with their hopes for relief from an oppressive or threatening situation—first-phase propaganda must appeal much more strongly at a spiritual level.
Propaganda addressed to the average man may say: "Vote (or go on strike, or whatever) for us, and in return we'll give you something that you want." But to the potential cadre member it must say instead: "Your conscience will not rest unless you accept your responsibility as a White man or woman and do what you know must be done, even if it means giving up everything, including your life."
Finally, whereas first-phase propaganda can be conducted effectively even on a small scale, third-phase propaganda is practically useless unless it can be conducted on a massive scale and can be sustained for a relatively long period of time.
Actually, the preceding paragraphs somewhat oversimplify the distinction between first-phase and third-phase propaganda. Even during the first phase, it is essential that propaganda involve many persons who are not suitable cadre material. If books, magazines, and other printed materials are to be published and distributed on a large enough scale to be economically feasible, for example, they must be purchased by others than potential cadre members. In addition, it is useful to place cadre-recruiting material into as many hands as possible; even those who will not themselves be recruited by it often pass on its message to those who will.
The first phase of the National Alliance program is not markedly different from the programs of other organizations. Every movement which aims at changing the world must first recruit a cadre of true believers before it can hope to move the masses effectively. But in its second phase the program of the National Alliance departs from the others. That phase, community-building, is dictated by the unique nature of the National Alliance task and by the conditions under which it must be performed. The task is to ensure that, even as the society around us remains on its course toward a degraded, mulatto future, the physical and spiritual basis for a rebirth of civilization will be preserved and nurtured. That is, a reservoir of the best human material, consciously guided by its innate values, must be available when conditions are such that it can serve as the seed for a new flowering of the race—and as the agent for preparing the soil for that flowering.
Human material, in the form of frozen sperm and eggs (or even frozen embryos) can be hidden away and preserved under refrigeration for centuries if necessary. But unless both the motivation and the means to thaw and utilize that material is also preserved, the exercise is pointless. Only a community of living men and women conscious of their identity and their purpose, can serve the latter need.
The second phase of the program, then, is the building of a community which is sufficiently well isolated from the larger society that it is able to live in accord with its own values and to maintain those values over the course of several generations, and which is structured in a way suitable to its role as both the bearer of the seed of a rebirth and as the agent to prepare the soil for it.
Other communities—Shakers, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Amish are examples—have been formed deliberately to preserve values over the course of generations, with different degrees of isolation and of success. The most successful example of such an endeavor is provided by the Jews, who have managed to preserve values, purpose, and, to a lesser extent, a particular human type over a remarkably long period of time.
Undoubtedly, there are lessons to be learned from the experience of all such communities. But the task of the National Alliance is unique, as are the conditions under which its community is taking form and under which that community must survive. At least to the degree of any past community ours must keep its values intact; and much more than any other it must maintain—and, to the extent possible, improve—its genetic basis.
To achieve these things it is not necessary to isolate the entire community on a remote island, although a degree of physical isolation for at least the core of the community is almost indispensable. What is necessary for the entire community is a very high degree of spiritual and social isolation. It must be a community which wholly rejects the values and the forms of the larger society, while holding faithfully to its own. It can do this only through the most rigorous possible education and discipline, based in a purpose-oriented social structure whose institutions are tailored specifically to the desired end.
Merely maintaining a good home—individual members teaching their children to be racially conscious and providing them with moral training—is insufficient; peer influence is nearly always stronger than parental influence. When there is a bad environment outside the home, it is often the preacher's son who is arrested for drunken driving first.
The community must provide a total moral environment for its members—an environment which builds character in the young, tests character in the mature, and keeps everyone conscious of and committed to its values and goals. Children must be raised, virtually from the cradle, with the sole aim of lifting theirs to their purpose. When an adult member goes forth into the larger society, whether on business matters or for the sake of continued recruiting for the community, the training he has received in his youth must serve him as an untarnishable coat of moral armor, so that the corruption and decay all around him leave him unchanged.
Most important of all is the moral quality of the community's leaders. It is inconceivable that they should be selected on the basis of their promises to the venal and the credulous or their ability to charm the gullible, as in the larger society. Instead, they must be trained, tested, and selected in a continuing, lifelong process, just as the other members of the community are for their various roles. This implies a structure which is hierarchical and meritocratic, both for the community as a whole and for its leadership cadre.
Building such a community is vastly more difficult than organizing an election campaign for the next George Wallace or Barry Goldwater who offers himself as God's gift to distraught conservatives—which may explain why the latter is tried so much more frequently than the former. But it is the former which is necessary—not only to preserve values and genes, but to act when the time comes to act.
The time for the third phase of the National Alliance program—outward-directed community action—will be determined as much by the ripeness of conditions in the larger society as by the size and strength of the community. And the action more likely will be a gradual encroachment in those domains where the enemy is weakest than a sudden, frontal assault on his citadel.
An example of such community action is the use of community resources to acquire mass media—local radio or television stations, daily newspapers—and, if necessary, operate them at a loss in order to be able to exercise the political and ideological influence inherent in them.
Another example is the expansion of territorial sovereignty: the acquisition of a new territory within which members of the community exercise the dominant political, economic, and moral power and are able to prevent others from taking it away from them. This may involve continued recruiting, and a combination of colonization and natural increase.
A third example is the infiltration of members into the power structure of the larger society—into the military command structure, key governmental investigative or law enforcement agencies, and communications networks—where they will be able to compensate, to some degree, for the numerical superiority of hostile elements.
All of these actions have been used by other communities to advance their ends. Whether or not they also can be used successfully by us will depend upon how well we build our own community. What is certain is that without a well-trained, well-disciplined, thoroughly conscious, and utterly determined community made up of the best men and women available we will not be able to sustain any program for more than a few years. And no program which depends upon bringing about a radical, long-lasting change in America's or the West's racial, political, and spiritual environment in only a few years can succeed.
